The impact of interventions in the global land and agri‐food sectors on Nature’s Contributions to People and the UN Sustainable Development Goals

• Published in: Global change biology Vol. 26; no. 9; pp. 4691 - 4721
• Main Authors: McElwee, Pamela, Calvin, Katherine, Campbell, Donovan, Cherubini, Francesco, Grassi, Giacomo, Korotkov, Vladimir, Le Hoang, Anh, Lwasa, Shuaib, Nkem, Johnson, Nkonya, Ephraim, Saigusa, Nobuko, Soussana, Jean‐Francois, Taboada, Miguel Angel, Manning, Frances, Nampanzira, Dorothy, Smith, Pete
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01-09-2020; Wiley
• Subjects: adaptation; Afforestation; Agribusiness; Agricultural land; Agriculture; Agroforestry; Animals; Biodegradation; Biodiversity; Carbon; Carbon capture and storage; Carbon content; Carbon sequestration; Climate change; Conservation of Natural Resources; Crop insurance; Ecology, environment; ecosystem services; Emissions; Energy consumption; Energy harvesting; Environmental hazards; Fire hazards; Food; Food production; Food security; Goals; Humans; Land degradation; Land management; Land use; Land use planning; Landslides; Life Sciences; Livestock; mitigation; Nature's Contribution to People; Organic carbon; Organic soils; Pasture management; Pollution control; Post-harvest decay; Rangelands; Renewable energy; Risk management; Risk sharing; Salinization; Soil; Soil compaction; Soil erosion; Soil water; Soils; Storage; Sustainability; Sustainable Development; Sustainable Development Goals; sustainable land management; trade‐offs; United Nations; Water management; Water pollution; sustainable development; mitigation; trade-offs; food security; sustainable land management; land degradation; adaptation; Nature's Contribution to People; ecosystem services
• ISSN: 1354-1013; 1365-2486
• DOI: 10.1111/gcb.15219

Interlocked challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation require transformative interventions in the land management and food production sectors to reduce carbon emissions, strengthen adaptive capacity, and increase food security. However, deciding which interventions to pursue and understanding their relative co‐benefits with and trade‐offs against different social and environmental goals have been difficult without comparisons across a range of possible actions. This study examined 40 different options, implemented through land management, value chains, or risk management, for their relative impacts across 18 Nature's Contributions to People (NCPs) and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We find that a relatively small number of interventions show positive synergies with both SDGs and NCPs with no significant adverse trade‐offs; these include improved cropland management, improved grazing land management, improved livestock management, agroforestry, integrated water management, increased soil organic carbon content, reduced soil erosion, salinization, and compaction, fire management, reduced landslides and hazards, reduced pollution, reduced post‐harvest losses, improved energy use in food systems, and disaster risk management. Several interventions show potentially significant negative impacts on both SDGs and NCPs; these include bioenergy and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, afforestation, and some risk sharing measures, like commercial crop insurance. Our results demonstrate that a better understanding of co‐benefits and trade‐offs of different policy approaches can help decision‐makers choose the more effective, or at the very minimum, more benign interventions for implementation.
Interlocked challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss and land degradation require transformative interventions. However, deciding what to pursue and understanding relative synergies and trade‐offs is difficult. We examined 40 different options, implemented through land management, value chains, or risk management, for their relative impacts across 18 Nature’s Contributions to People (NCPs) and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A relatively small number of interventions show significant positive synergies with both SDGs and NCPs, while some options like afforestation and bioenergy/BECCS show negative trade‐offs. Our results demonstrate that a better understanding of benefits and trade‐offs can help decision‐makers choose effective responses.